Take Courage (48 page)

I sighed and felt uneasy and perplexed; all this seemed
so confused and confusing, unlike the old conflict between right and wrong, the oppressed and the oppressor, the Puritan and the Royalist, which was so clear and well-marked in the war.

“Nevertheless I do not think you should oppress the sectaries,” said I. “Nor,” I added, “should the sectaries oppress.”

John laughed. “Well, you are a woman, Penninah,” said he, “and may support both sides at once if you wish.”

“I support the right wherever I find it,” said I.

“Stubborn!” said John, laughing and putting his hand on my shoulder, for I was feeding my youngest child. “But for my part,” he added in a sober tone, “I am a man and have to take a side, and I shall not side with Cromwell.”

“What does Lord Fairfax think of all this?” said I.

“Why,” said John, “he is like you, Penninah; he supports the right wherever he finds it.”

“Well, then,” I argued. “He will find a way through this without taking sides.”

“God grant it prove so,” said John very soberly.

The Scots burst down into England in the summer, and Cromwell came north and marched about in Yorkshire, expecting they would come down into Lancashire, then cross the hills along the River Aire and go towards York, as it has been the habit of marauding Scots throughout the centuries to do. I was terrified lest John should go and fight again, especially when we heard that Captain Hodgson was with Lambert's part of the Army, but he did not; he shook his head and said that Cromwell had brought the Scots on us, so he should leave the Scots to Cromwell.

“To do Noll justice,” said he, “I believe I may leave him the Scots without any fear.”

I hoped very earnestly that we should not have another great battle in Yorkshire, and my hope was fulfilled; the Scots were in Lancashire when Cromwell caught them, and he cut their army in half and chased them both north and south and routed them utterly and took all their commanders prisoner and followed them up into Scotland. So
now, I thought, we shall have peace surely; and I set myself very gladly to preparing sheets and napkins and body-linen and stockings for Thomas, who next year, if all went well, was to go to Cambridge, to Clare Hall. Since we had no store left out of which I might furnish him, I began my preparations in good time, so as to spread the expenditure.

Old Giles Ferrand kept away from The Breck at first after John's return, but after a time he crept back again, and took up a warm place on our hearth—though it was now in the houseplace, not by the kitchen fire. John was apt to snort a little and be stiff with him, so that I asked him once whether he preferred that I should give his uncle a hint to stay away. He hesitated a moment, and then said no—as Giles had paid his fine, taken the oath and made his composition, he said, there was no reason to exclude him from the company of honest men; and after that he was less abrupt, though still not very pleasant. He disliked particularly to see Mr. Ferrand playing with Chris, and sometimes I was hard put to it to prevent him doing so, though it grew easier when Chris began, as he did this year, to go to school. Old Giles did not now watch me baking and washing and scouring, for we had maids and boys for this again, but as I stitched and patched and knitted—with a man and three growing boys and an infant to care for, there was always much sewing to do—he followed my needle with his faded old eyes, very intently. One day he timidly and with a deprecating laugh, fumbling at his doublet, asked me to sew him on a button. I took the doublet off to do so, and found it worn and out-at-elbows—I was ashamed not to have noticed this before. His shirt, too, was roughly patched and, to say truth, somewhat dirty. I scolded him a little, mended his doublet and urged him to buy a new one; he smiled timidly again and said he would do so, but not, perhaps, just yet. Next week I chanced to notice that he still wore the same shirt, dirtier by the wear of a se'nnight. So it came about that at The Breck we washed and mended both for Mr. Ferrand and his man Ralph, and as they grew shabbier, I fitted them up with the cast-off garments of
John and the lads. Perhaps I even cast these off a little sooner than was necessary on that account; Sam, who was grown a great lad all of a sudden, complained in jest that when he wanted a clean shirt to go to market in, he had to go to Holroyd Hall to find one. John frowned a little over this, and in general when he saw his uncle by our hearth his expression was that of a man who has stumbled over somebody else's dog in his own house, but he made no open reproof to me, nor did he sulk with me about it, and in time he grew used to the old man's presence, and forgot his grievance against him.

It seemed to me that Mr. Ferrand must be very poorly off nowadays, to wear our clothes and eat our bread—as he did, though secretly; I gave him a cup of broth and a piece of oven cake hot from our oven many a time, though he would never sit to our table—and I wished John to advise him about his affairs. John frowned and set his mouth at first when I asked him, but a few days later I heard him proffering his services to his uncle in the matter of selling the wool from his few poor sheep. This would have been a good beginning, I thought, and I was pleased. But old Mr. Ferrand rejected John's offers sharply; striking his stick on the ground, and with a high colour in his faded face, he cried:

“I will manage my own sheep while I live, John Thorpe!”

“You are right, Uncle,” said John quickly, with that stolid air he used to conceal vexation. He would not broach the matter again, nor did I like to urge him too strongly.

In this year of which I am thinking, about the autumn time old Giles began to mumble and grumble about what was to happen to King Charles. This was a matter to which I had not given much, or indeed any, thought, and I asked the old man curiously what he considered would be the future of his King, to whom, poor man, he was still greatly devoted. To my amazement he actually appeared to fear for Charles's life. I laughed, and told him such fears were ludicrous.

“Why so?” grumbled Giles. “They killed Lord Strafford, they killed Archbishop Laud; since they have raised their
eyes so high, they may raise them a little higher, and get as far as Royalty.”

“Killed Archbishop Laud!” I exclaimed. “Nonsense, Uncle!”

“It is not nonsense, Penninah,” said Giles peevishly, halting his full spoon in the air to argue with me, so that I watched his uncertain hand somewhat anxiously. “Your friends tried Archbishop Laud, and executed him, long ago. Now when was it? Well, as I remember it was some time before that accursed battle of Naseby, for which your Fairfax was paid a diamond locket.”

This silenced me and made me thoughtful; I had felt hatred enough for Laud, certainly, for all the miseries he had brought on my family, yet I could not fancy executing a minister of God in cold blood, even one so cruelly mistaken, and I was vexed to think I had missed this transaction, which once would have meant so much to me. When I asked John about the matter he confirmed Giles's tale, and when I went further and enquired about the King, he spoke with an impatient irritation which betrayed his own trouble in the matter. The King, he said, would be deposed, for it was impossible to treat with him; while he negotiated with you, you could be sure he treated with your enemy; letters of his, captured on the battlefields, showed him so full of lies and double-dealing that even Lord Fairfax—“who is the last man in the world to believe evil of another,” said John—had now despaired of him.

“But it is not the King who troubles me,” concluded John.

“What troubles you then?” I asked quickly.

John hesitated. “Oh, this and that,” he said. “And the Army is twenty-six weeks in arrears with pay.”

I opened my lips for another question, but John went away abruptly.

I was so busy coaxing my little Abraham through his teething, and sewing for Thomas, and listening to Sam's market tales, and helping Chris with his school-work—alas, he was no scholar; his large round straggling writing, much blotted and very ill spelled, brought a sad smile to my lips,
'twas so like his father's—I was so busy with all this, and with re-stocking The Breck and clothing John very warmly against the cold, for he was subject to rheumatic aches since his campaigns, that in spite of old Giles I did not take much notice of public events at that time, or puzzle my head over King and Parliament and Army, thinking that now we had peace. I could see that John was a little uneasy, but I put it down to his absence from Lord Fairfax after so many years' close association. But then one cold December day, a dreary dark still day, with the sky lowering sombrely over the hills, suddenly in the middle of the afternoon our door was thrown open and John strode rapidly in, and crossed the room without a word and made for the stairs. It was Leeds Market Day, and I did not expect him back till night; besides, there was a look on his face, dark and tormented, such as I had not seen there before since he came home. Alarmed, I ran to him.

“What is it, John? Tell me,” I begged, laying my hand urgently on his arm.

“There has been a purge of Parliament,” he said. “Forty-one members have been unlawfully excluded.”

“Have the Royalists started all over again?” I cried; for this was the same kind of meddling with our liberties which had started the war.

“It is not the Royalists,” said John gruffly, not looking at me. “It is our own fanatical Army men.”

He put my hand aside, though not unkindly, and went straight up to our chamber and closed the door.

I sat for a while, stunned, all my feelings suspended, and then I went upstairs and very quietly set back our chamber door. John was on his knees by the bed, deep in prayer. There was such an intensity of grief and disappointment in the very lines of his body, his bowed head, the strain of his doublet across his shoulders, the tight grip of his clasped hands, that I could not break in upon him; I stole away quietly, sick at heart.

“Are we to have no peace?” I asked myself. “Why cannot we have peace, after this misery of war?”

Well, I have lived through peace and war, and I know now how they go. In peace, because of some weakness or excess in the hearts of men, some grievance becomes intolerable, not to be borne—either old rights are withheld, or new and better rights are refused to be granted. There is argument, contention, dissension, division; at length it seems as though the matter cannot be settled peacefully, because of the unreasonableness of the enemy, which blocks the way to human betterment; then comes the bitter arbitrament of war. Then there comes victory; and then the hope of peace. But I believe the most difficult thing in all the world is to make a good peace.

For consider the conditions in which peace is made. There are the opponents whom you have just defeated, to whom it is necessary, if the peace is to be lasting—since after all you must needs go on living together—to be fair and kindly, within the limits of the change you have fought to accomplish; yet bitter feelings prevent you from offering justice, and they from receiving it. There are those within your own party who wish the change you have fought for to be far more sweeping, so that your late opponents cannot certainly, and you yourself can hardly, live within its frame. Against these latter it is very difficult to contend, for they can easily make you appear, even to yourself, as a traitor to the cause for which you fought. To steer a straight course between these two parties, your enemies and your fanatic friends, is a hard matter; insensibly you incline to one side or the other, and thus become one of the things you took up arms to fight. (For if you incline to the Royalists, then you become Royalist; but if you incline to their bitter opponents, then you become oppressors even as the Royalists were oppressors, though called by another name.) There is always the Army, too, which since it has done the fighting expects to do the governing, though fighting does not fit for governing, but rather the reverse. If the Army has a grudge as well, as of arrears unpaid or petitions unheard, it is a very potent source of mischief, for soldiers have the arms with which to enforce their claims. Thus the circumstances
at the close of any war are so difficult that they require the continued exercise of the highest powers of man, while at the close of any war both these highest powers are out of practice from disuse, and men are very weary and therefore apt to be impatient at a long continuance of any exercise.

Yes, peace is more difficult than war; for war allows the excesses of the human heart full play, while peace requires us to control them. And before we have managed to do so, the time for making peace has slipped away.

So it was with us, at least. Without, there were the Royalists; within, the fanatics; looming always in the background, the Army. All of these, and the moderate party too, were mortal, all subject to the imperfections of the human heart; some so impatient to secure their own desires, as to become too careless of the means adopted to secure them. After the fanatics on our side took the same unlawful means to their ends as our enemies did to theirs, after this purge of Parliament, when Colonels of the Army stood at the door of the House and kept representatives of the people from entering to do the task for which the people had elected them, after this we never had any real peace—nor did we deserve it. John, I think, saw it then; I only perceived it slowly, as the consequences of the act emerged, and, in default of repentance and reform, drove our affairs continually from bad to worse.

The Army had thus purged the Parliament because it desired the trial of King Charles, and knew there was a majority at Westminster determined against such severe courses. Lord Fairfax knew nothing of the purge till it was over; he had long been uneasy at the Army's actions and wanting to lay down his commission as Lord General, but was as constantly urged to retain it, lest the Army's excesses should grow worse without his care. The soldiers had a great respect for his person, and could at least, he thought, be kept from actual violence while he was at their head. So he stayed on, and perhaps by this very love of peace and order lent their deeds more countenance than he should.